Renowned prosecutor says war criminals no longer heroes

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One of the world’s leading prosecutors of war crimes came to San Francisco last week with a surprisingly upbeat message: In a world wracked by violence, international law is making headway.

Not long ago, “in most countries, war criminals (were) war heroes,” Richard Goldstone, the former chief prosecutor on United Nations tribunals for Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia, told a Commonwealth Club audience on Wednesday.

“That’s changed. …Impunity has been withdrawn,” Goldstone said. “For anybody who values justice, the advances have been nothing short of amazing.”

Those advances would be even more amazing, he acknowledged, if the United States would join the International Criminal Court, the UN’s chief tribunal for prosecuting genocide and crimes against humanity. Although President Obama has been more cooperative with the court than his predecessor, George W. Bush, Obama has not asked the Senate to ratify U.S. membership or to repeal a law signed by Bush that would authorize a U.S. military invasion if any Americans were brought to the court’s headquarters at The Hague to face charges.

“One of the problems with the International Criminal Court,” Goldstone said, “is not having the U.S. fully on board.”

Goldstone, 75, a highly respected judge in South Africa at the end of the apartheid era, was appointed chief prosecutor of the newly established UN tribunal for Yugoslavia in 1994. Later that year he was also named the lead prosecutor for the court hearing criminal charges over the massacre of ethnic Tutsis by the ruling Hutus in Rwanda.

He knew virtually nothing about international law, Goldstone recalled, but Nelson Mandela, the new president of the post-apartheid nation, “forced me” to accept the UN position on condition that he would return to South Africa’s high court afterward. He stayed at the prosecutors’ posts until 1996, gained funding and international recognition for the courts, and filed charges against the Bosnian Serb president, Radovan Karazic, and his top general, Ratko Mladic, for the killings of more than 7,000 Bosnian Muslims in the town of Srebrenica.

Between the post-World War II Nuremberg trials of Nazi leaders and the establishment of the Yugoslav tribunal, “there was no such thing as international criminal justice,” Goldstone said. “The Rwanda tribunal let the world know about an unprecedented genocide,” in which 800,000 Tutsis were slaughtered in 100 days, he said.

And unlike Nuremberg, which was organized by the war’s victors, he said, the UN tribunals were established by the international community, with no element of vengeance.

Still, Goldstone conceded, “international criminal justice (is) all about politics.” Which is why the United Nations will never refer any of the five permanent Security Council members — the United States, Russia, Great Britain, France and China — to the ICC for prosecution, he said. It’s also the reason that Syria, protected by Russia, will never see its leaders prosecuted for war crimes, Goldstone said, unless a future Syrian government joins the International Criminal Court, which can initiate prosecutions on its own. (Goldstone didn’t mention his own run-in with the U.S. government under President Obama, which rejected a report he wrote for the UN in 2009 finding war crimes by both Israel and Hamas in the Israeli government’s 2008 military strike on Gaza.)

One question from the audience was why all the International Criminal Court prosecutions have been against African leaders. More nations in Africa than elsewhere have ratified the treaty that created the ICC, Goldstone replied, and several current cases were referred to the court by African countries themselves.

But the court is also investigating alleged atrocities in non-African nations, like Afghanistan and Colombia, Goldstone said. Once cases from elsewhere in the world are brought to trial, he said, “supporters of the court will sleep a lot more restfully.”